more on constraints

One of the most interesting themes of the Montfort/Bogost Atari book (and from all of Bogost’s work on videogames, more generally applicable principles emerge) is that the pitiful weakness of the Atari hardware actually turned out to be a virtue.

A more powerful Atari would not necessarily have meant better games. By working within the relatively strict limits of the machine, game designers had to invent all sorts of tricks. The scorpion and the cobra in Pitfall, the signature enemies in that game, were used solely because those animals were the most identifiably representable with the Atari technology, not because the designer had some sort of totemic obsession with scorpions and cobras in particular.

This is just another example of the value of constraints. A longer book isn’t necessarily better, and neither is a book (or lecture) whose parameters you freely chose yourself. If we choose everything freely on our own, we are likely to be drawn into deadening repetition, simply because each of us is so limited, with such a relatively small repertoire of actions and responses. But start to take some cues from your environment, or from the concrete conditions that gave rise to a particular writing assignment, and you will be forced into innovation merely by the nature of the task.

This is why I rejoice over the 43,000-word limit on L’objet quadruple. Would it be a “better” book at 120,000 words? Not really. It would just be a different sort of book. I like the obligatory concision and allusiveness that will be forced upon me by that strict upper limit.

The more absolute constraints you can identify in a project, the more energetically you will be able to get down to work. A book is not the confession of a soul, but the dialogue between that soul and the highly specific situation that compelled it to write.